“There is no culture of education in Michigan. It’s not a priority here.” Best practices for bettering school performance abound. All we need to do is adopt them, Finley writes.
The most startling finding: Just 28 percent of parents believed a college education was essential to the success of their children. Michigan was clearly still clinging to a past era when the route to a comfortable middle-class life was just as likely to go through a factory as it was a college campus.